Negotiating the Whirlwind: Can Secretary of State John Kerry break through in Syria?

Last edited Mon Dec 14, 2015, 09:35 PM - Edit history (2)

(David Remnick's "Insider Visit" with SOS John Kerry--seems a fitting post here on "Foreign Affairs" given the situation we find ourselves in with fighting ISIS/DAESH which has many worrying about WWIII.)

Its a long, wonky article...but, as it goes on, eventually gets into the issues we discuss here daily. Remnick is well respected, in some circles of power, and it is the kind of long journalistic article with interview/insight of those in power that we rarely see these days.

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Negotiating the Whirlwind Can Secretary of State John Kerry break through in Syria? -- New Yorker
Profiles December 21, 2015 Issue
Negotiating the Whirlwind
Can Secretary of State John Kerry break through in Syria?
By David Remnick

John Kerry, the sixty-eighth Secretary of State of the United States, was born to a temperament of wintry rectitude. He is descended from the Winthrops, who helped found the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and the Forbeses, a Brahmin clan that made its money in railways and in exporting tea, silver, and opium to China. His father was a diplomat. Kerry attended St. Paul’s and Yale (where he was in Skull and Bones) and, as a naval officer in Vietnam, earned three Purple Hearts, the Bronze Star, and the Silver Star. He dated Jacqueline Kennedy’s half-sister, sailed with J.F.K., and married twice into substantial fortunes. Despite the codes of his class, however, Kerry was never entirely subtle about his ambitions. When he was in prep school, his classmates used to play “Hail to the Chief” to him on the kazoo.

In 2004, when Kerry lost the Presidential race to George W. Bush, who is widely considered the worst President of the modern era, he refused to challenge the results, despite his suspicion that in certain states, particularly Ohio, where the Electoral College count hinged, proxies for Bush had rigged many voting machines. But he could not suffer the defeat in complete silence. He was outraged that Bush, who had won a stateside berth in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War, used campaign surrogates, the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, to slime his military record. He was furious, too, at Robert Shrum, his chief strategist, and other campaign advisers who had restrained him from hitting back.

“For a long period, after 2004, every time he even half fell asleep all he saw was voting machines in the state of Ohio,” Mike Barnicle, a close friend of Kerry’s and a former columnist for the Boston Globe, told me. This summer, Barnicle spent time with Kerry on Nantucket, where Kerry and his wife, Teresa Heinz, have a house on the water and a seventy-six-foot, seven-million-dollar sailboat called Isabel. “We were sitting in the bow,” Barnicle recalled, “and we were talking about a bunch of different things—about Iran, about what the President of Iran was like—and I said, ‘Other than not being President, this is pretty good.’ There was a security boat sailing off to the side of us. Then he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, I realize how badly Shrum screwed me.’ ”

Continued at..........

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/12/21/negotiating-the-whirlwind?intcid=mod-most-popular